Beta Code

Beta Code was a method of representing, using only ASCII characters, the characters, accents, and formatting found in ancient Greek texts (and other ancient languages). Its aim was to be not merely a romanization of the Greek alphabet, but to represent faithfully a wide variety of source texts – including formatting as well as rare or idiosyncratic characters. For most applications, it has been obsoleted by Unicode. Beta Code was developed by David W. Packard in the late 1970s and adopted by Thesaurus Linguae Graecae in 1981. It became the standard for encoding polytonic Greek and was also used by a number of other projects such as the Perseus Project, the Packard Humanities Institute, the Duke collection of Documentary Papyri, and the Greek Epigraphy Project at Cornell and Ohio State University. Beta Code can be easily converted to a variety of systems for display, most notably Unicode. Most of these projects have since converted their data to Unicode. For example, Perseus originally encoded all its Ancient Greek texts using Beta code, but now releases them as Unicode.